Corn vs. Rye vs. Apple Mash: Comparing New England's Three Spirit Makings

Barnaby, my black bear, caught the smell of mash on the wind tonight and concluded it was Thanksgiving. He was half right: Thanksgiving for somebody, and a funeral for the corn. With him settled at the end of his chain, I propose to you, fellow alchemist, a prize fight in three corners. In one stands Indian corn, sweet and fat; in another, rye, lean and peppery, grown on rocks; in the third, the apple, sweet-smelling tart of every New England dooryard. Corn is the farmer's wife, rye the widow down the road, apple the tavern girl, and all three will give you a headache in the morning if you treat them wrong.

Let it be said plain before any reader takes up his pen: making distilled spirits for drinking without a federal permit is against the law of these United States, and what follows is set down for history and education only. I have been arrested twice myself, and I assure you the law means it.

Three Crops of the Granite State

New England corn is flint corn, the old eight-row kind, its kernels hard and glassy in red and yellow and some near black, and it ripens in a short summer that would kill a Virginia dent corn before August. In the mash tub it yields a sweet, round, buttery spirit, like warm bread with a little honey upon it. But that kernel is hard as a deacon's heart. It must be cooked in near-boiling water until the starch bursts and turns to paste, or your yeast will sit starving in a sea of food.

Rye grows where nothing else will, like a Merrimack County deputy's whiskers. Wheat sulks upon our thin, cold, acid hillsides; rye shrugs and grows anyhow, and on the stony hill farms of Barnstead and Gilmanton it was the bread grain, baked half and half with corn meal as rye-and-Injun. In the jar it gives pepper, clove, a bite of dry hay, and a finish that kicks the back of the throat like a mule that has waited all day to do it. Tax a man's rye and he takes it personal, as Mr. Hamilton learned in '94, when the Monongahela farmers tarred a revenue man or two and President Washington marched an army out to settle what we call the Whiskey Rebellion.

The apple, fair maiden of New England, does not grow true from its seed. Plant the seed of a fine sweet eating apple and you will most likely raise a crabbed little knot so sour it puckers a man's mouth till he can whistle in two keys. The old-timers called them spitters, and so nearly every orchard planted from seed was a cider orchard, not a pie orchard. John Chapman, Johnny Appleseed, who died in '45 out in the Indiana country, went into the storybooks a saint, but I would wager the cider did more for his popularity than the pie. In New Hampshire hard cider was the table drink at breakfast, at noon dinner in the hayfield, and at supper. Run it through a still and you have apple brandy, apple jack, which the Laird family of New Jersey has made since 1780, and good apple brandy tastes of an October afternoon: baked fruit, cinnamon and a little leaf smoke.

Starch Against Sugar

The true brawl is not over taste but over money and work. Corn and rye are starch, and starch is locked up. To reach the sugar you need malt, grain sprouted and dried, usually barley, whose enzymes take the cooked starch apart. So the grain man must grow, thresh, grind, cook, malt, mash and ferment. The apple man shakes a tree, grinds the fruit in his mill, presses the pomace through straw, and finds his juice is sugar already, working on its own wild yeast in a week or two. Lazy, you say? I say clever. But the apple keeps a knife hid in her apron, and I shall show you the blade presently.

A Drunk Bear and Deputy Throop

My first arrest by the Merrimack County sheriff came in mid-October, when the windfalls under my old trees had lain two weeks in the wet and fermented where they fell. Barnaby ate about a bushel and a half of them and walked thereafter like a Concord legislator coming home from the Eagle Hotel, all dignity in the shoulders and none in the feet. Next morning a deputy, whom I shall call Throop, for his mother has suffered enough, came up the turnpike with a warrant in one hand and a ham sandwich in the other. A smart man would have kept only one of those.

Barnaby sniffed the ham from forty rods. A drunk bear is not a mean bear but a loving one, which is worse, and on a chain I had, to my eternal shame, lengthened the week before, he took Throop round the middle like a long-lost cousin and down they went into the pomace heap. He licked the cider and mustard off him, took the coat for the sandwich in its pocket, had the trousers off without unbuttoning a button, and chewed upon a boot until, when I drove him off with a hot poker and a jug of molasses, the deputy had lost its heel and the little toe that stood in it. I dressed the foot in my operating chair and pulled his two bad molars free of charge. He arrested me anyhow, in his drawers.

Mark this, though: a real bear on real fermented fruit is no joke, having no more sense than a drunk man and four hundred pounds more to throw. Barnaby is a Suncook Valley tall tale. Do not go feeding bears.

What Each Mash Does to Copper

Silas 'Hacksaw' McAllister of the Fort Wilkins foundry holds that rye hates a coppersmith most. As an apprentice of fourteen he saw a stubborn Gilmanton farmer fill his pot to the brim with rye mash to save a second run, then fire it like a locomotive. Rye mash is gummy as wallpaper paste and foams when heated; it climbed through cap and neck and came out the worm as hot gray porridge, while the bottom scorched and the pressure blew a seam. The man had no spirit, no pot, and a floor to shovel. Fill short with rye, says Silas, keep the fire gentle, and stir.

Corn is gentle till she is not. Her starch settles, and on the bottom of a kettle over direct fire, unstirred, it cooks to the copper like tar on a road. Silas once spent the better part of a day with cold chisel and mallet cutting such a crust from a neighbour's pot; it came away in one black disk near the size of a cart wheel hub and rang like a bell upon the floor. Scorched corn smells like a tannery burned down with the tanner inside, and the burnt taste rides the vapour into the hearts. No cut will save a scorched pot.

Apple wash, once done working, is near as sour as vinegar. A Barnstead orchard man left his nine days in a new pot while he attended an uncle's funeral and a cousin's wedding, and came home to find the inside furred green like moss on the north side of a stone wall. That green is verdigris, raised by the acid of the fruit, and you want it in nobody's mouth. "Copper's a friend," Silas told me, "but you don't leave a friend standing in vinegar." Run your apple wash when it is ready and rinse the pot that same night.

The Old Method and the Cuts

As the old-timers did it: stir cracked flint corn slowly into water near the boil, about a bushel's meal to every twelve or fifteen gallons, though every man swears by his own ratio like scripture. Cook it an hour or more to a thick, sweet-smelling porridge, cool it to about a hundred and fifty on the Fahrenheit glass, where a finger can just stand it, and stir in ground barley malt, a peck or two to the bushel. Within the hour the paste goes thin and sweet. Cool it to blood-warm or under, about eighty, pitch your yeast, cover it loose, keep it warm, and let it work three to five days till it goes sour and still. Air the room, for fermenting mash breathes out a gas that will lay a man down in a closed cellar and never let him up.

Rye goes the same way, only harder: more water, a strong arm on the paddle, and often corn to thin the stickiness, as in a hill farmer's bill of half rye, a third corn and the rest malt. Fill the pot two parts in three, keep a gentle fire, and if the spirit runs cloudy or thick at the worm, pull the fire back at once. Apple cider ferments on its own yeast in a cool cellar till dry and hard. Now the knife in her apron: the pectin in fruit flesh and peel, the stuff that sets your wife's jelly, gives off more methanol, the blinding wood spirit, than grain does, and more still if pulp and pomace ferment with the juice. With apple, make a more generous heads cut and do not get greedy.

The cuts serve all three. The foreshots come first, sharp and chemical as a cobbler's glue pot, the worst of the wood spirit; pour every drop on the ground far from the fire. The heads follow, smelling of nail varnish and a hangover; set them aside, undrunk. Then the hearts, sweet and clean, smelling of the grain or the fruit itself, the very reason a man owns a pot. Last the tails, oily, of wet dog and wet cardboard, kept to run again with the next charge. Copper works upon the vapour the whole while, but it is a fine servant and a poor master; it does not make your cuts for you.

Alcohol vapour burns. Never leave a running still. Look over every joint before you light, keep your fire down and steady, a bucket of water and one of sand by the door, and no open lamp near the worm's end. Silas makes his joints of rivets and silver solder or tight brass fittings on clean, pure copper sheet: never scrap, never anything with a mystery in it.

Hickory Ash, Red Oak and the Blue Flame

Rabbit Miller of Wilkesboro, North Carolina, a Tarheel bold enough to write a Yankee less than a year since Appomattox, sent word that his uncle swears by hickory ash or red oak shavings in the thump keg to clean out bad heads. Hickory ash is alkali, which is to say lye, the very soap makings every New England farm wife leached from a hopper of hardwood ashes; in a keg it will clean only your hide. Red oak is open-grained, all little tubes running end to end, and leaks liquor right through the stave, which is why whiskey barrels are white oak. Shavings of either lend colour, tannin and a bit of barrel taste, but that is flavouring, and a painted fence is not a mended fence. Nothing tossed in the keg removes wood spirit. Only the man at the worm, a clean jar in one hand and a waste jar in the other, does that.

Nor does the tavern trick of putting a match to a spoonful prove a thing. The blue flame tells you only that a liquor burns, and so does my cabin, though I would not drink it. Methanol burns a clean pale blue scarcely seen by daylight, so that flame may be blessing the very poison that blinds you. The bead, likewise, tells you roughly the proof and nothing more; it does not know a heart from a head. An honest cut needs no flame's permission.

So ends the brawl: corn the sweet wife, rye the peppery widow, apple the sour tavern girl with a knife in her apron. Respect all three, and keep your copper clean, your cuts honest and your fire low.